


half sick of shadows

by Nautica_Dawn



Series: dynasty of storms [3]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Dubious Consent, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Murder
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 08:25:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1068243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nautica_Dawn/pseuds/Nautica_Dawn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mai isn't insane. But she will be, eventually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	half sick of shadows

**Author's Note:**

> For those who haven’t read when the world stops spinning, all you need to know is that this takes place after Sozin’s comet ends a stalemate. Currently, the Avatar is in hiding and Zuko is presumed dead. Oh, and Ty Lee is an airbender.

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              The island is in the far south of the nation. There are no trees anymore, just low vegetation and the silence of a dead island watched over by giant stone monoliths carved to look like the ancestors of the lost people who once lived here.

                Her ancestors, she reminds herself. These are _her_ ancestors. 

                She glides along the ancient roads, though the shadows of the sentinels. It’s so light here, so primitive.

                She tries to ignore the shape of the statues, the way their chins and high foreheads look just like hers. 

                Her people left this island centuries ago. They embraced the darkness in their minds and adopted the dark intentions of their neighbours and so they left for the dark corners of the northern islands where their skin turned pearl-white and their eyes turned from blue to silver. 

                The waves crash upon the shore and it means nothing to her. 

 

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                Red fire churns at the curtains. It scars the walls and threatens her skin. The burning beast is thrashing beside her. 

                It doesn’t stop when she screams.

                It doesn’t stop when she burns her arms holding it down. 

                It doesn’t stop until she throws her body into the inferno and lets the beast have everything of her that it stops and the fire dies away until all that’s left is her damaged little princess. 

                Azula is getting worse.

                She doesn’t know how to help. 

.

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                It starts with a little shop in Ember Island. 

                They’re selling little models of her stone ancestors and it makes her blood flare with an element that isn’t hers until she sees what’s beside the figurines. 

                The spider fingers her mother laments (too long too thin too _watery_ ) reach for the vial. 

                When she buys it, the girl at the counter looks ready to faint. 

                No one sees the figurine she slips into her sleeve. 

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.

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                “Do the stars have names?” It’s one of Azula’s lucid moments. They’re so rare and only seem to come out on night like this, when the only light in the sky is that of the stars. 

                “Yes, they do.”

                “Do you know them?”

                “No, I don’t.” 

                Zuko once told them the names, when he tried to be the impressive older brother and Azula was willing to oblige him. 

                Her precious princess turns, gold eyes shimmering red in the light of nearby torches. She’s grinning and for just a moment, it’s like Ty Lee hasn’t left and Zuko is still alive and everything is _right_. 

                “They keep whispering to me but I don’t know what to call them, so I can’t respond.”

                …and then it’s not.

.

.

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                She kills three assassins sent after her princess before she tracks down their source. 

                Ozai fears his daughter. 

                Stupid man. 

                Azula is a danger only to herself. 

                Mai, on the other hand, is another story entirely.

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                It’s been used in this palace before. It’s likely what put Ozai on the throne. There’s poetry in that, but she’s never been very good with poetry. That has always been Azula’s area of expertise. 

                Beautiful Azula is asleep, peaceful for once but her nightly tea was dosed with a sedative. Mai just can’t stand to see her princess toss and turn and scream and set the world aflame. If she can save her princess from the monsters, then she will do whatever she has to. 

                The vial glitters dangerously in her hands. She bought it, kept it, for some unknown reason. Maybe it was to save Azula from the darkness. Maybe it was to save herself. 

                But Ozai will do. 

                If she does this right, he will only appear ill, just like Azulon before him. 

                It’s called oleander and it will do just fine.

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                Azula’s hands are soft and sweet. Contrary to her public personality, the princess in bed is almost submissive in her gentleness. 

                Mai loves that about her. 

                Loves the way her gold eyes light up and her pink lips and her brown hair—

                —brown, not black, it’s brown like Princess Ursa’s not black like Ozai’s because Azula is a princess not a monster—

                —that’s always messy in the mornings and every burn scar from every training mishap and the way she bites her lip when she’s reading and the way she pours tea and her voice when she’s happy and the way she sounds when she sings and the way she spins when she dances or fights and just _everything_.

                Mai loves Azula. 

.

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                Love is a tricky thing. 

                It burns like nothing else, soothes like nothing else, steadies the soul like nothing else, blows everything else away like nothing else. 

                It is all four elements combined.

                She hates it. 

                Love, like the four elements, causes insanity and war and death and beauty and happiness and sorrow and _hope_. 

                Mai has had many loves in her life. The wind has taken all but one. 

                She will not let it take her princess. 

.

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                Getting close enough to administer the poison is the tricky part. 

                The answer comes when she’s sitting through a luncheon with her mother and one of her mother’s girls. She’s a sweet little thing, this one. With wide almost-grey eyes and brown hair and a face so familiar it _hurts_. 

                This girl’s voice sounds like the howling wind shrieking through monsoon season. Her smiles are airy and her hair is carefully tousled like it’s been kissed by the breeze. 

                Mai hates her. 

                When her mother leaves them alone, the other girl offers her a fluttering smile. 

                “You’re disgusting to look at,” is all Mai says as she stands and stalks away.

                She can talk to her mother later. 

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                “Su Lee is one of my most promising students.” Her mother is shuffling through papers, looking for her Book. “I don’t know what happened while you were gone, but you’ve been awful to the Kagami ever since you returned. I know that youngest one was your sworn sister, Mai, and I know you’re hurting, but you’re not alone in that grief.”

                Lies. All of them. Her mother won’t admit that she didn’t go away like one of the girls who got in the family way without a husband or a fiancé. She went away because she made a stupid mistake and got herself thrown in prison in Ba Sing Se. 

                Of course it was Ba Sing Se. Everything important happens in Ba Sing Se. Why _not_ send the prisoners too politically volatile for a Fire Nation prison to Ba Sing Se right before the comet? 

                So of course the wind came to reclaim its bastard in Ba Sing Se. 

                Breathe in, breathe out.

                That other girl doesn’t matter anymore.

                Azula is all that matters. 

                Beautiful, mad Azula needs Mai’s help. 

                “Mother,” she says. She holds out the Book. “About the family business, maybe it’s time I started helping you.”

.

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                She wonders, sometimes, if Azula knows what she’s doing. She always covers her princess with kisses and lets the fire wrap around her when she comes home after an assignment and she knows that’s not like her, but her mad, beautiful, precious, darling princess is the only thing that can erase the feel of filthy hands and foreign mouths. 

                She hates it. It’s horrible, awful, degrading, disgusting, sickening, toxic—

                Everything is for Azula. 

                That’s all that matters. 

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                “You should have joined before now,” her mother tells her one evening. “You are the best I have.”

                Mai smiles and is the perfect daughter until she’s back with her princess. She swallows the bile and presses her mouth to Azula’s, hands buried in brown hair as she tries to drink in all the fire. 

                Just _something_ to burn everything away. 

                Later, when she’s wrapped in her princess’s arms, she’ll spy the little figurine on the desk and she’ll think of silent oceans and an ancient people who ran to the sun. 

                Maybe she’s not so superior after all. 

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                It takes her six months to get to Ozai. 

                Her mother gives her a new gown for the occasion. It’s a more glamorous version of the red sheer shirts the other girls wear. 

                She is told it was made for her wedding to Zuko, should such a thing ever happen.

                Poetic, almost, that she wears it when she takes wine to his father, when she smiles beguilingly as he takes in the oleander poison, when she glides out of the room and leaves him to his death. 

                Zuko was supposed to burn this off of her. Ozai almost had the chance. 

                Mai kisses Azula with everything she has when blue flames take the fabric instead. 

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                The Fire Sages don’t want to crown Azula. 

                She’s too unstable. 

                She’ll destroy everything. 

                They must find Iroh instead. 

                _Fools_.

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                It’s called clock-flower. On its own, it doesn’t do much. But when combined with other herbs in the right way, it makes a tea that keeps Azula calm.  

                Getting Azula to drink it is the tricky part. 

                “Hush now, you need to take your medicine.” She has her princess between her legs, shaking back pressed against her chest as she holds a hand against a sweaty forehead. The teacup is steady in her other hand, just waiting to be taken by the unwilling princess. 

                Azula twists away from the teacup, hot breath against Mai’s throat. “It’s awful and it makes me feel sick.”

                “I know, but it’s this or let the Sages give the throne away. You want the throne, don’t you? It’s rightfully yours.” Mai speaks softly, sweetly, everything she can to get her princess to drink the tea. 

                “Let Zu-Zu have it.” 

                She stops trying to give the medicine to the princess. It’s been a year since Azula last mentioned Zuko; two since the comet. 

                And her beloved doesn’t seem to know. 

                She closes her eyes and presses her lips against the sweaty skin at the princess’s brow. “Zu-Zu left the throne for you, love. You have to be the Lord.”

                Azula’s eyes are gold and _painful_. She can see too much in them and Mai takes the tea herself before pulling her princess to her. There’s only a little resistance this time. With the tea gone, Mai stands up, picking up the uncrowned emperor. Azula’s losing weight. The princess was never this light before. 

                By the time she makes it back to their room—theirs because it is even if it’s not proper, wouldn’t be proper even if they were married and of opposing sex but who gives a fuck anymore?—her eyes are heavy and her princess is asleep. The taste of the tea is bitter on her tongue. 

                She stays awake only long enough to tuck Azula in.

                Mai falls asleep on the floor. 

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                Two weeks into taking the tea, just when Mai has almost convinced the Sages to crown Azula, there is a commotion in the gardens. 

                Her princess is raging, but it’s different. It’s broken and there are tears and there is frustration and anger and hurt and oh Agni that’s a firebending stance so _why is there no fire?_

                One of the Sages refusing Azula’s claim to the throne coughs politely to get her attention. “The princess’s medicine. Does it contain clock-flower?”

                The last time she felt like this, that disgusting bile-flavored feeling that the world has just irreparably changed and not for the best, she’d just watched her sworn sister control the wind. 

                _Deep breath, Mai. Everything is for Azula._

                She nods. 

.

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                Azula’s coronation is two days later. 

                It is pouring rain when the Sages slide the Lord’s flame into her princess’s hair. 

                The sea is lashing out when they give her the Lady’s flame, binding her to her princess in all ways for all eternity. 

                There is no ceremony, no celebration. Power just quietly shifts in this war-torn world. The war will not end and that is all anyone cares about. 

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                Their people want the war to end. 

                Mai wants it to end. The war is what hurt her princess. It turned a little girl’s soul into kindling and set her alight until all that remained was the monster of the azure flame. The war killed Zuko, took Ty Lee away, and it’s destroyed her country.

                But she can’t end it. 

                She sighs, setting aside the papers. The clock-flower tea has made Azula both sedate and more unstable, leaving her to rule in her Lord’s place. It’s stressing. The Sages have made it more difficult. In exchange for their cooperation, she has to keep her princess on the clock-flower tea. 

                It means leaving Azula with no bending and too much time alone with her thoughts. 

                Her beauty is asleep in bed, bathed in red silk and moonlight. It’s the only time when Mai doesn’t feel guilty. Azula asleep is an Azula without insanity. It’s easier like this. If only she could sleep all the time. 

                A soft smile and then Mai returns to her papers, but not before something at the window catches her eye. There, in full moonlight, is the little figurine of her ancestors and that’s when she realizes it. 

                She is the only one in the room the moon will not touch.

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                It takes her a while to see it, but there it is. A pattern, a definite pattern. A naval base here and there, ships mysteriously sinking on calm seas, entire regiments just disappearing. At first she thought the White Lotus finally got its act together, but then she starts to notice exactly what is going on. 

                This is too intelligent, too organized. Whoever this is, they’re focusing mostly on the communication system. The attacks are only using one or two elements, never all four. 

                A waterbender to drown the naval bases in crashing waves. A firebender to sink the ships. An earthbender to bury the troops. And an airbender to take the hawks. 

                Ty Lee found some friends. 

                But this means the Avatar was abandoned. 

                

 

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                Azula is getting worse. She barely speaks these days, but when she does, she’s delirious. She can’t keep track of when and where she is. Mai is the only one she seems to recognize anymore. 

                It is awful keeping her locked up in that room. What should be the Fire Lord’s chamber has become little more than a gilded jail cell. 

                Mai kisses away Azula’s tears, and prays the war will end without bringing anymore harm to her flame princess. 

 

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                When the end comes, it comes quietly. 

                The guards whisper stories of a bison at the caldera’s edge. 

                She sends them all away. She will not fight, she says. 

                This ends tonight. 

                And so she takes up her knives—she said she would not fight, not that she would not defend herself and her princess. She goes to the throne room, leaves Azula asleep—peaceful for once—in their room. 

                This _will_ end tonight. 

                It has to.

 

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                Ty Lee has changed. Her hair is short, she wears the colours of her blood. She looks like she just stepped out of a Temple. Except the arrows. Ty Lee does not bear the arrows of her ancestors. 

                It’s almost comforting. 

                “Hello.”

                The airbender (when did it become normal to think of her like that? _Airbender_. The Avatar is an airbender. Ty Lee is just _Ty_ ) smiles weakly. “Mai. How have you been?”

                This conversation is so mundane. She wants there to be fighting. She wants there to be anger because Agni she is _furious_. She wishes now the water would answer her. She’d drown the caldera; fill it with water, churn it ‘till the palace and the noble houses are naught but dust in the currents.

                But she is not a bender. Her blood betrayed the moon and now the sea will not heed her pleas. 

                “Are you here to end this?” Mai steps over the flames, carefully moving towards her sworn sister. 

                Ty Lee just shrugs. “If you’ll let me. I’d rather do this without fighting.”

                Long, cold fingers trace the too-soft lines of the airbender’s cheek, carefully brushing strands of too-brown hair out of too-grey eyes. “I’m tired.”

                “How is Azula?”

                There’s something about that, about hearing her princess’s name roll off her sworn sister’s tongue that brings the anger to the surface. “Don’t speak of her.”

                “Mai?”

                 “You lied to us. You were one of us and you lied to us and you abandoned us. We needed you. Even after Boiling Rock you should have known that. The three of us belong together.”

                Ty Lee shakes her head, but says nothing. 

                Mai just wants to hurt her. 

                Instead, she kisses her hard enough to bruise. 

                It never dawns on her that as an airbender, Ty Lee can quite literally steal her breath. 

 

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                When she wakes up, her clothes are wet and there is water all around her. The palace is too silent, too still. 

                She feels it in her bones before she opens the door to their— _her_ —room. 

                Azula is gone. 

 

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                It can’t be known it ended like this. The loss of Azula needs to be in battle, not quietly in a dark room in the middle of the night. 

                The coronation plaza has been destroyed. It wasn’t infighting, she thinks. The Avatar was involved with this.

                So, the other side is just as much a mess as the Fire Nation. That’s not very comforting. 

                Azula is so light, too light. Mai can’t remember the last time either of them actually ate a full meal. The princess fits into her arms so easily, it’s like they were made to be together. 

                She looks so peaceful, laying there amongst the rubble. Like this, the people will believe she died battling a rogue Avatar. Mai can use this to her advantage. 

                But Azula shows no sign of battle, and if a waterbender were to examine her, it would probably be obvious how she di— _left_.

                Zuko wouldn’t let anyone but himself do this. 

                And firebenders leave marks. 

                Mai takes out her favourite knife, and goes to work. The rain obscures her vision just a little, but this work doesn’t have to be clean. 

                (it isn’t raining)

 

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                And now it ends. 

 

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_fin_

**Author's Note:**

> Title: toxic  
> Dedication: Happy Birthday, Brave Mars <3  
> Disclaimer: I own nothing.  
> Prompt: Mai/Azula. Dark corners, dark minds, dark intentions// “you’re disgusting to look at.” // jail cell// red sheer shirts  
> Notes: A NOVA documentary about Easter Island spawned this. It is set in the world of dynasty of storms but it takes place during the three year time skip in when the world stops spinning. Eventually this will be continued to become half sick of shadows in full, but this first chapter is my birthday offering to Mars.   
> Just an explanation: The idea of Mai being of Water Tribe descent is all Yue’s fault. I’m serious. There were several scenes throughout the series where one of them looks so much like the other in terms of facial structure. It’s most apparent from profile and it’s not just Yue. Katara and Korra both have scenes where they have a similar look. It’s more than likely just a by-product of having the same animator, but Mai is the only non-Water Tribe character I could find who has those same features. This combined with Easter Island and the clusterfuck that is dynasty of storms produced this story. I’m not sorry.


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